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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Asklemmy
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You seem to show some of your self-image here (a concept that replaces the misleading "ego"). The short description you give seems to tell that this is attached to "the quantity of your doing". Hence the idea of "living = doing more = becoming more" vs. "dying = doing less = becoming less".
While there is nothing wrong with that in principle (heaps of books exist on the different philosophical approaches on this wider topic and yours is quite popular among certain cultures), we could without changing much arrive at a different but perhaps more satisfying conclusion.
The change is from equating "living" to the experience of exercising our body and mind, to "living" being the experience of purely inhabiting and owning that body and mind. -- That would probably be what people mean when they seemingly tell you to paradoxically "live a little" (implying to mean "live a little more") by "doing less". Which, when we really concentrate on enjoying the pure experience will not actually mean that we are just idling but it would mean we would be less occupied with exercising and more occupied with observing the living (or observing the feeling of it). Whether we actually do physical/mental exercising or not does not really matter. It's just more easy for many people to do the observing while they are "idling" or "meditating" in a still way, but any way that fits a specific person is good. We might be surprised by how active we are when doing that.
That way we could arrive at the insight that "doing less" does not equal "becoming less" (perhaps even the contrary), neither that "dying" equals "becoming less". :-)
edit ... If we were to see "living" and "dying" purely as functions of an organism regardless of the existence of a self-image, then "living" would mean a sustained state of dynamic equilibrium whereas "dying" would be a transitory state toward non-equilibrium (that is decaying). Interestingly, decaying should then be a transitory state from being one dead organism into sustaining the equilibrium of living in other organisms (i.e. becoming the other); while there would be no transitory state toward becoming living (there's just a transition from being a single cell to being an organism).
It's true that I emphasize industry in my life (a bit of an understatement perhaps). I find it essential to know exactly who I am and what I need to be doing. So that narrow focus works well right now.
Perhaps one day, I'll think about experiencing things more passively. There's nothing wrong with it. On the other hand, I really do enjoy doing things. An alarming amount of things! So maybe I won't really slow down later in life after all. It keeps me fit if nothing else!